Lord Moser: My Lords, I welcome the Government's acceptance in principle of this amendment, so that ultimate responsibility for what are now called the residual responsibilities will go back to the Cabinet Office. I remind your Lordships of a nice historical point. When Winston Churchill established the first statistics office in 1941, he set up a central office because of the lack of coherence and co-ordination in statistics across Whitehall. He placed the new statistics office in the Cabinet Office. It remained there happily—including during the many years I was in charge of it—and moved to the Treasury in, I think, 1989.
	The welcome for its move back to the Cabinet Office has nothing to do with any negative feelings about the Treasury; indeed, I am confident that since 1989 the Treasury has looked after government statistics very carefully, especially economic statistics. However, there is no doubt that it had a conflict of interest because of its leadership in economic affairs, whereas the Cabinet Office is a consumer-neutral department, so to speak. Therefore, it makes total sense that these responsibilities should go back there. I wish the Minister for the Cabinet Office, who will not have the ultimate responsibility, well in this task. I am sure that this new situation will help the reforms that we have debated.

Lord Jenkin of Roding: My Lords, if I may put it in a magisterial way, the noble Lord, Lord Moser, spelt out the history of the Bill and how we have reached the position we are in now. He made a compelling case for putting this measure in the Bill. In these circumstances I do not think that I need to add very much. He referred to the commission's annual report, which was published today, 9 July. I am grateful to the officials in the Printed Paper Office who were able to give me a copy at the release time—10 o'clock this morning. I confess that on Friday I asked them whether they would arrange that, and they did.
	I wish to refer to two paragraphs of the report. We should bear in mind that the Statistics Commission is not a statutory body and that the code that it has been operating is not a statutory code. I refer to annex D of the report, should anybody wish to pursue some of the other examples. It states:
	"The National Statistics Code of Practice sets out principles and practices that government departments and agencies should follow in producing and publishing official statistics. However, only a few parts of the present Code are of a kind that readily allow an independent judgement to be made about compliance".
	Some of the examples that the commission dealt with in that year are set out in the three or four pages that follow. It had to consider whether what happened was consistent with the code. I shall not read out all the examples, because we wish to reach a conclusion on this; I shall mention only one matter which related to the publication by the Department for Education and Skills of annual results for key stages 1 and 2. The argument arose in the department about the right date on which to publish them. The commission said:
	"However, internal DfES correspondence, made available to the Commission in order to explain the Department's decision-making process, suggested that senior officials and special advisers believed that their own views on the appropriate release date for the figures were a relevant consideration".
	The commission makes it clear that it did not think that that was at all appropriate. The issue must be considered against that sort of background.
	The Minister will recognise that we have raised this issue previously; there has been a tug within the Cabinet between the Treasury, which was originally in charge of this Bill, and other departments that publish statistics, which were desperate to retain control over their pre-release arrangements. I shall not quote him exactly, but the Minister said that anyone who has been in Cabinet knows that that is how it works. That has happened here, but the Minister in the Treasury at that time was the right honourable Gordon Brown, the former Chancellor the Exchequer and now the Prime Minister. He is now in a position to impose his will on his colleagues and make sure that they fall into line with what he originally would have liked to see: these matters firmly set out in the Bill, with the board having the monitoring role. These amendments would do that. One would delete Clause 11, which states simply that the board shall have no responsibility for the pre-release of statistics. That flies in the face of everything that the Minister said in moving his Motion and that is why it is absolutely right to insist that the code shall deal with these matters in the way set out in the amendments spoken to by my noble friend.
	This is a matter of enormous importance; it is emphasised by how the Statistics Commission has reported on what will be its last year of operation. We now have a statutory Statistics Board; that is in the Bill. We now need a statutory code backed by legislation. That is what our amendments would achieve, and I hope that the House will support them.

Lord Ramsbotham: My Lords, once again I am enormously grateful to the Minister for being so forthright and clear. I am very grateful to all those who have spoken and am sorry that time has not allowed a longer debate. I am also very grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Rosser, for putting his case. I am glad that it has been put like that because it allows me to say that nothing is further from the case and that I have fully considered what the impact might be on the Prison Service.
	Virtually all the 237 reports, six thematic reviews and five annual reports that I wrote while Chief Inspector of Prisons homed in on some problem of management which was inhibiting the development of the Prison Service. We are not talking about damaging the Prison Service or about every incident being liable to prosecution. We are talking about the occasional gross breach of management which it does no good to the reputation of the Prison Service or anyone else to leave unexamined.
	Cautiousness of course is a risk. One reason why I suggested in my letter to the Secretary of State for Justice and discussed with, among others, the noble Lords, Lord Hunt and Lord Lea, having a date as far ahead as 1 January 2009 was to allow precisely the sort of consultation and examination that the noble Lord, Lord Rosser, mentioned. I believe it is terribly important that that should happen. This debate is not about all the preventive measures the noble Lord mentioned; it is about management.
	My concern remains, as the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, said so clearly, that "may" is not a doing word; it could be a delaying and a holding word. We still have a duty to make that point as firmly as we can, because this issue affects us all. Therefore, I wish to test the opinion of the House.